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PA IN THE MEDIA

Skills and land shortages hold back West Midlands car industry

By:

andy sharman

| financial times

29 September 2015

PA’s Daniel Hirsch, a manufacturing expert, is quoted in an article in the Financial Times. The article discusses skills shortages in the automotive industry; Daniel comments on Jaguar Landrover which is expanding in the UK.

The article explains that JLR’s efforts to employ more skilled engineers are taking vital skills from other companies in the West Midlands region. Of the automotive employers in the West Midlands region, 90 per cent have fewer than 100 staff.

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Daniel says: “This has become a big issue for JLR, because suppliers haven’t grown with it, so it has to order a significant amount of parts from other countries and ship them to the UK — from Morocco and the Balkans.”

The article goes on to say that JLR is shifting its focus to overseas plants in China and Brazil. Daniel explains that this “means the suppliers in the Midlands get only a part of the additional volume JLR is bringing to market, which makes them careful with their investment strategy.”